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John Shumaker's Curriculum Vitae

The stepping stones on John Shumaker's career path to becoming UT's president seem exceedingly well constructed. Consider:

After getting his doctorate in classical studies from the University of Pennsylvania, Shumaker taught for eight years at Ohio State. His academic credentials provide a foundation for identifying with the concerns and commanding the respect of faculty that his past several predecessors at UT (J. Wade Gilley exempted) have lacked.

As a dean and then vice president for research and academic development at the State University of New York at Albany in the 1980s, he was integrally involved in a sweeping retrenchment and redirection of SUNY's curriculum and mission. "That was very, very painful," Shumaker says. "We were in court for decades. But 20 years later, the university is much stronger as a result of what we did."

As president of Central Connecticut State University from 1987-95, he coped with one of the most severe fiscal crises that any state has experienced in recent times—unless it's Tennessee of late. The upshot was Connecticut's adoption of a state income tax, making it the 42nd and most recent state to do so.

As president of the University of Louisville from 1995 until accepting the UT post earlier this year, he presided over a university whose mission included graduate studies and research on a level comparable to UT's flagship Knoxville campus, as well as a medical school that credentials him for overseeing UT's Health Sciences Center in Memphis. He also excelled at fund raising; Louisville's endowment nearly tripled to over $500 million on his watch.

"I've held almost every job that one can hold on a campus, and I believe I've done them all well," says the 58-year old Shumaker, whose shock of almost uniformly dark brown hair belies his age.

Indeed, more then just his experience, Shumaker's attributes and accomplishments speak well of his ability to lead an academic institution whose decision-making processes can be stultifying. When large segments of the Knoxville campus were up in arms over his selection by trustees without any involvement on their part, he insisted on a meeting with faculty, staff, and students before deciding whether to accept. A packed house at the University Center auditorium peppered him with questions, which Shumaker fielded with aplomb and wit. When someone asked him, "Are you coming?", he brought the house down, or rather to its feet in a standing ovation, by responding, "Do you think I should?"

Everyone knows tough times and hard decisions lie ahead. But Shumaker has credibility when he gives assurances that he will not make them unilaterally. Unlike Gilley, who became increasingly didactic over the course of his abortive two-year presidency, Shumaker brings a reputation as a listener and a consensus-building implementer.

One area in which Shumaker will have to come up the learning curve is gaining knowledge of the state and especially its government and politics. But if the state's recent budget crisis and shutdown had any benefit, it was accelerating that process. "The pony in that manure pile was that I was able to engage the legislative leadership intensely and to forge very good relationships with the Tennessee Higher Education Commission and the Board of Regents and its university presidents, because we're all in this together," Shumaker says.

—Joe Sullivan

Whither goest a troubled University of Tennessee with a classics scholar at its helm?

by Joe Sullivan

John Shumaker is a master at punctuating the intensity with which he assays his daunting new job as president of the University of Tennessee with moments of levity. As an interview turns to discussion of how UT's shutdown during last month's state budget crisis has impacted his planning processes, he holds up a T shirt—a recent gift from one of his vice presidents.

The message printed on the front reads, "Sooner rather than later." The backside is emblazoned with a catch line from the movie Apocalypse Now: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." The dichotomy between these messages dramatizes the diversity of the challenges facing Shumaker since he assumed the helm of a deeply troubled university in June.

On the one hand, he is questing for a mastery of everything and everyone he needs to evaluate in order to start setting a strategic course for strengthening one of the most poorly funded and demoralized state universities in the country. "Sooner rather than later" has become his own catchphrase for the time frame within which he wants reports and plans from all sectors of a multifaceted UT system that encompasses four campuses, several free-standing institutes, and a hierarchy that oversees and supports them.

On the other hand, he's had to cope with the prospect of draconian cuts in state funding that preceded what's believed to be an unprecedented shutdown (albeit temporary) for a major university. He terms it "Armageddon."

"When you're faced with constantly planning for cuts, for eliminations, a shutdown," he says, "that crisis management mode is something that we can do and do it well. But it's a distraction from the larger strategic goal-setting and even the operational activities that you need to pay attention to." Nor does he believe that "surviving Armageddon" has been just a temporary task. "The message this [shutdown] sent to the higher education community and the country is that Tennessee is not a place to be. And we're going to have to spend a lot of time and effort over the next several years convincing people that this really can be a good place."

As if the shutdown weren't enough, the Vietnam—like quagmire into which a virtual freeze on state funding over the past several years has led the university compounds the problem. Everything from student and staff perceptions, to faculty recruitment and retention, to private fund raising is adversely affected. "We are now approaching a crossroads where the downward spiral of the last 10 years can accelerate very rapidly unless we do something to arrest it," Shumaker frets.

At this point, he is only prepared to speak in generalities about the remedies he has in mind. Trustees have yet to be consulted, and Shumaker is a great believer in involving the faculty, student body, and other UT constituencies in the strategy-setting and decision-making processes. But the vision that emerged over the course of two wide-ranging interviews is of a trimmed-down, more stratified university that will place greater reliance on reallocation of state money and on private sources of funding to achieve its goals. Just how realistic it may be to effect the kinds of changes Shumaker envisions remains to be determined. In addition to his own suasive abilities and resolve, though, it's clearly going to take a new regime of change agents to make good on them—and change is not a word that universities, or at least their academicians, are predisposed to view favorably.

UT's New Regime

When J. Wade Gilley resigned under a cloud in June 2001, UT's longtime senior vice president for business and finance, Eli Fly, was named to hold the fort as interim president. But when Shumaker came on board, the 66-year old Fly retired from the university proper (though he has been named president of a somewhat autonomous foundation that will contribute to fund raising).

Fly's retirement is just one of many departures, counting several pending retirements, that leave big holes to be filled. These include the deans of three of UT's larger colleges: Arts and Sciences; Engineering; and the new College of Education, Health and Human Sciences that resulted from a traumatic consolidation of the Colleges of Education and Human Ecology. In addition, the highly regarded head of health sciences in Memphis, Bill Rice, has declared his intention to retire next year, and athletic director Doug Dickey is also docketed for retirement.

Traditionally, search committees have filled these positions, at least the academic ones, by advertising them and then screening applicants to produce a short list of finalists from whom one is selected after interviews. In a break with that tradition, Shumaker intends to supplement the process by employing a search firm to identify and recruit candidates. As the recent presidential search attests, UT is presently held in such low esteem that only recruitment is likely to attract worthy candidates. Indeed, it took both recruitment by a headhunter and entreaties by Gov. Don Sundquist and key trustees to get Shumaker to consider moving to Knoxville from his prior post at the University of Louisville.

"As one looks at turnover or new positions, I'm going to insist on a much more aggressive national recruiting policy," Shumaker says. "I want people around us who've been at great universities, who know how they behave and what it takes to build them and keep them going."

Yet for perhaps the most important post he intends to fill, Shumaker is not planning to conduct a search let alone use a search firm. The post is not a new one but rather the restoration of the position of chancellor of the Knoxville campus. When Gilley become president in 1999 he effectively assumed the chancellor's role as well, unceremoniously accelerating the retirement of longtime Chancellor Bill Snyder. That left Snyder's heir apparent, John Peters, in the post of provost with responsibility for the Knoxville campus' academic affairs but not its overall operation, and Peters soon departed to take the presidency of Northern Illinois University.

It wasn't until shortly after Gilley's abrupt departure that a new provost came on board in Knoxville. Almost from the moment he arrived, Loren Crabtree had an uplifting effect on a campus that was thoroughly demoralized by the Gilley debacle, state funding woes, and the absence of a president with any credentials for providing academic leadership. The bearded and attentive Crabtree, who came here from the provost's job at Colorado State University, quickly became the go-to guy in what otherwise might have been a leaderless interregnum.

In recognition of Crabtree's already broadened responsibilities and his broad base of faculty support, Shumaker is pointing toward naming him chancellor—though only after formal consultation with the Board of Trustees and the Faculty Senate. "My impression from informal consultation with the faculty is that they very much want to see that happen, and I think it makes good sense if we can do it a way that does not strain the budget," the new president allows. In a subsequent conversation he adds that. "I think Knoxville needs a full-time CEO...I can't be a chancellor of a major research university and still be a president of the system. I don't think the two are compatible."

Yet it would appear that a more exalted title for Crabtree might be more symbolic than substantive. When Snyder was chancellor, he had development, operations, and research deputies reporting to him—though their roles seemed to overlap those of counterparts with systemwide responsibilities who reported to then president Joe Johnson.

Shumaker is clear that the university's vice presidents who hold these responsibilities today will continue to report to him. These include vice president for agriculture Jack Britt, vice president for operations Phil Scheurer, vice president for public service and government relations Tom Ballard, and vice president for research and information technology Dwayne McCay.

Shumaker is high on all of them. "I think the vice presidents I'm working with are first-class," he says. With the wit and verve that permeate his conversation, he terms Scheurer the "quintessential protean administrator. He takes the shape, whatever shape is necessary to get through the situation, and I mean that as a compliment." As for Ballard, Shumaker says that in the wake of their collaborative efforts toward the end of the legislative session, "Tom and I are almost joined at the hip to the point where it would be illegal."

The one new (as opposed to restored) position Shumaker plans to create in his high command is a vice president solely for information technology, leaving McCay to concentrate on research. "Infotech and research are two elephants on the plate, and I think any vice president just needs to have one elephant on their plate," he says. "Dwayne has systemwide issues and especially the Oak Ridge partnership, which is so important."

At the same time, creation of the infotech position connotes an affirmation of one the top priorities set by Gilley: namely, bringing more technology, especially web-based course content, into the classroom as well as developing courses offered via the web. UT recently lost its top person in this field, Susan Metros, to Ohio State. While her deputy, Julie Little, carries on and can point to many accomplishments, Little says, "We were all stung by Susan's departure."

A Stratification Strategy

Shumaker professes to be undaunted by severe budgetary constraints, including poor prospects for much improvement in state funding, looking ahead.

"We must decide what we're going to be with the resources that we've got, and that's why I've been using the phrase 'we're going to give Tennessee the best university it can afford,'" he says. "Now, it might look different. It might be smaller. It might be stratified...But it is going to be quality; it is going to be student-centered; and it is going to be focused on the land grant values of putting knowledge to work in some form or another...And we're going to have to do some surgery, and it's not going to be pleasant."

The words "stratified" and "selective" recur in reference to everything from the undergraduate student body to graduate programs. Reducing the size of the freshman class represents a starting point. Shumaker envisions its reduction to around 3,600 from a targeted 3,800 presently in Knoxville. This, in turn, means more selectivity as measured by student ACT scores, and higher ACT scores lead almost invariably to higher student retention and graduation rates.

"My instinct is that the total enrollment will stay pretty much the same at Knoxville [about 26,000], but the mix will be different: slightly fewer freshmen; slightly more upperclassmen," he opines. "And, by the way, we have a little more capacity at the upper class level than we do in the freshmen. And there will be more graduate and professional students and a higher quality student all the way around—not elite, not exclusive, but much more selective."

UT has become notorious for oversized classes for freshmen, especially in such core fields as English, and for not offering enough sections of a course to accommodate student demand in an oversized class. But even if there's improvement here, many students complain that upperclass capacity isn't sufficient to let them get the courses they need for graduation in a timely way. A cursory review of course sign-ups with associate dean of arts and sciences Don Richard Cox reveals that waiting lists for several psychology courses are almost as long or longer than the number of students enrolled.

To which Shumaker responds that, "We've got to make our staff, our administration, our faculty much more supportive of our students...and I think that's one of the reasons why a chancellor in Knoxville might be so important because you need somebody on the campus who gets up every morning and has a sign over the bathroom mirror saying 'It's the students, stupid' rather than, 'It's the stupid students.'" (Not that Crabtree hasn't been espousing this view as provost.)

Raising undergraduate retention and graduation rates are right at the top of the list of goals on which Shumaker believes his own and the university's performance should be measured. For the most recent year at his fingertips, freshman retention in Knoxville was 77 percent, where "it should be in the low 80s at the least." Graduation rates, now at 57 percent "should be up in the 60s." But he goes on to say that "it's very hard to notch up the graduation rate because focusing on graduation rates represents a cultural sea change for a university. Universities are used to focusing on the notion [that] it's survival of the fittest, and if you don't succeed it's your problem. Knoxville especially has to adopt a more supportive philosophy toward the students."

Where graduate programs are concerned, Shumaker says selectivity will mean fighting "the culture that says nothing is ever cut. You only add, and you never question the assumptions. It's dogma, and what we've got to do is question that...I think, in fact, that out of this crisis there could emerge a new model for a land grant university which is not everything to everybody, but one that focuses on critical needs, balances all needs against what the core values and traditions of the university are. So we're not going to get rid of Greek philosophy...but whatever we offer at any level we want to make sure it's the very best we can do and is competitive nationally with the best programs and measured against the best programs."

For starters, Shumaker envisions that, "I'd sit down with Loren and the deans, and I'd say, 'Give us our 20 best programs.' And what if we wanted to make those 20 or a subset of them the best in the country? What would it take? How do we do that? Those are the kinds of questions we should be asking, and then the question is, well, if it's the underwater basket-weaving program that is close to national prominence, is that one we should elevate higher?"

Perhaps illustrative of the difficulties of making good on such an exercise, UT went through an intensive process of identifying programs that deserved more resources—and by their omission those that didn't—during the 1998-99 academic year. But very little came of it. Snyder and Peters spurred that academic performance evaluation effort, but then they were gone, and Gilley never really followed through.

Crabtree has recently set in motion a new strategic planning process that he says will be in large part a "refreshment of APEC [as the 1998-99 process was known]. The deans tell me that lots has changed since APEC, and they're right." But it's not as if Crabtree has been avoiding tough decisions in the meantime. He's completing an $8.5 million reallocation of funds from lower to higher priorities that's involved, among many other things, traumatic consolidations: one, the Colleges of Education and Human Ecology; and, two, the College of Communications and the School of Information Sciences. Snyder had been thwarted on both of the above.

It's easy for most laymen to recognize the need for graduate education in the professions, the sciences, engineering, and just about anything that has the word tech in it. These clearly contribute to the betterment of society in general and the economy in particular. But it's much harder to appreciate the need, as opposed to the nicety, of supporting doctoral programs in the liberal arts and social sciences, especially when times are tough.

The Iron Lady of the Knoxville campus, Anne Mayhew, recognizes this and has a lot to say about it. Mayhew, who is both vice provost and dean of the graduate school, acknowledges that, "we have to look very carefully at whether we should shed some. Critical size is needed to make them effective. You just can't justify a program that only attracts one or two students a year, and you also have to ask whether programs are of sufficiently high quality."

But Mayhew insists that a flagship university "should be open to all areas of legitimate and important inquiry. You don't want to base it all on practical applications today, because if you do you may ignore important applications in the future." From a purely practical standpoint, she points to three reasons why graduate education justifies its keep. For one, the graduate students of today become the college faculties of the future—"our seed corn" as she puts it. For another, graduate students play an important role in undergraduate education—without them as teaching assistants, the university's instructional capacity would be severely curtailed. Finally, without the prestige and stimulation that graduate students bring to them, top faculty would start leaving the university in droves. "To abandon programs where we do have good faculty and students would be an admission that we aren't committed to having a flagship university that measures up to every other state in the region," she cautions.

Research and Technology

Research and technology were J. Wade Gilley's watchwords when he became UT's president in 1999. Making UT one of the nation's top 25 public research universities was his most heralded goal. And toward that end, he set in motion the selection and formative funding of nine "centers of excellence" whose prime mission was to capture more and bigger slices of the humongous federal research pie.

At the same time, he was convinced that web-based learning was the wave of the future. He found UT laggard both in terms of incorporating web-based instructional content into the classroom and in terms of offering courses primarily, if not exclusively, via the Internet. To help fund these undertakings, he turned to a $100 per-semester technology fees on students (atop double-digit tuition increases in each of the past three years).

Considerable progress has been made on both these fronts and is worthy of recounting. Beyond that, the question becomes to what extent the Gilley legacy and goals will be embraced and carried forward under UT's new regime.

According to Crabtree, the centers of excellence "in general are doing very well to the tune of $100 million in new awards." That's in less than 18 months since they were formed in early 2001. And Crabtree is clear they have a great deal of further growth potential for boosting the estimated $91 million in federal research grants that UT received in the fiscal year ended June 30.

This growth potential has been stunted, however, by the state Legislature's failure to make good on the second half of a $15 million commitment toward funding the centers. UT has been drawing on other sources as well for investment in the facilities, equipment, and other infrastructure needed to support the centers' growth to the point that they can sustain themselves. "Our folks are doing a great job," Crabtree says. "There's no question about it. But it's slow now. You have a lack of seed money. We're not going to let them slide, that's for sure. But we won't make the rapid progress we'd hoped for, because we don't have all the resources we'd counted on."

Shumaker credits Gilley for launching the centers and says "we're certainly going to keep them going and keep investing." He also lauds his predecessor for combining UT-Knoxville into a single academic unit with the Health Sciences Center in Memphis (where the research center that has generated by far the largest amount of grants to date is located).

"Gilley doesn't get the credit he deserves for that," Shumaker says. "Making Memphis and Knoxville one accredited university is really a genius approach. By doing so, you remove one of the impediments to a higher national profile for the University of Tennessee."

On the other hand, Shumaker disavows Gilley's heralded goal of making UT, however defined, one of the nation's top 25 public research universities. "We're presently tied for 50th, and I'd like the university in eight years, if that's how long I'm here, to be better than the top 50," he says. "But all the other universities are moving and this state is not. If you look at the last 10 years, you can see that Tennessee's position has weakened. So I would say that staying in the top 50 should be our goal for now, not because you're bragging, but because it's a measure of how much you are going to energize the economy of your state through work force development, R & D, technology transfer, and the like. And if you're falling off the list, it means you're being less effective."

Where information technology is concerned, Crabtree boasts that UT now has the largest wireless network of any public university in the country. "We're the first major university to be totally wireless," he claims. That means the Internet can be accessed wirelessly from any classroom on campus, which means, in turn, that any instructor can draw upon web-based course content—assuming students have laptops. And how many are doing so?

"Julie Little tells me that about 500 of our 1,500 instructional personnel are using the web for instruction, and I think that's a high number, and it means everything from a totally web-based course to chat rooms and the like, "Crabtree says.

He singles out for praise an intermediate Spanish course (Spanish 150) that he believes can be a prototype for many others. "It's a course for students who've had high school Spanish, and if they go through it successfully it completes their language requirement. Well, we couldn't meet the demand for it. So our Innovative Technology Center [Little's unit] went out in partnership with the Spanish Department and they got a grant from the Pew Foundation and they totally redesigned the course, and it's marvelous. Exercises now are all accomplished on the web...Students then work on those and they're graded instantly. So the student gets instant feedback."

Not only has removing all of the routine drill work from the classroom greatly increased the course's student capacity, it has also sharply reduced the university's cost per student. "They cut the cost from about $115 a student to $25 a student," Crabtree says.

So why isn't the redesign rapidly being extended to other languages and beyond? Little's answer is guarded and diplomatic. "It requires a partnership between the administration, the faculty and ITC to effect the change, and that can be difficult to embrace because it means changing your teaching philosophy and how you interface with students."

Little is also more guarded than Crabtree in her assessment of how successful UT has been in getting faculty to make use of the web. "We're back in the pack somewhere, but we're not in the rear," she says.

The wireless net doesn't begin to meet the needs of the College of Business Administration where the dilapidated condition of its 50-year-old Glocker Hall is both an embarrassment and a deterrent to attracting top-flight faculty and M.B.A. students.

"Better aesthetics would be nice, but the single biggest problem is our inability to use technology," says the business school's dean, Jan Williams. An aide explains that, "if you've got 40 people in a classroom, sharing bandwidth through one access point becomes a bottleneck, and it's going to take another level of bandwidth to support videoconferencing and other needs we have."

According to Williams, "Trying to retrofit the building to meet our needs is a virtual impossibility." Plans for a $24 million renovation and expansion were completed two years ago, but Gov. Don Sundquist's recommendations to fund it via a state bond issue have gone unheeded by the Legislature. In the meantime, the business school has relocated most of its M.B.A. classes to shared classrooms in the law school's newer building.

Getting More Money

At first blush, the revenue streams flowing into UT look imposing. For the UT system as a whole, total revenues of slightly over $1 billion this past year include $412 million in state appropriations, $212 million in tuition and fees, $290 million in all manner of grants and contracts, $76 million in gifts, endowment, and investment income, and $50 million in sundry other categories.

Yet by almost any measure, UT is one of the poorest of the 14 state university systems covered by the Southern Regional Education Board. According to SREB data, expenditures per full-time equivalent student that had been 10 percent above the SREB average in 1995 had dropped 5 percent below it in 2000, with Tennessee representing one of the few states to show an actual decline after adjustment for inflation. Average UT-Knoxville faculty salaries of $60,772 in 2000 lagged behind the SREB average by more than $1,700 and also showed the smallest increase since 1994-95 of any SREB state.

Zooming in on UT-Knoxville, state appropriations of $164 million have scarcely increased for the past decade, and the prospects for any significant improvement in these operating funds don't look good. As matters stand, UT's boat can only get lifted in conjunction with all other universities and community colleges in the state under a formula established by the Tennessee Higher Education Commission. All have suffered as funding has declined to 88 percent of what the formula calls for from full funding in the late 1980s, but UT has suffered more. That's because the formula gives great weight to enrollment. And while schools like Middle Tennessee State University have been growing like topsy, UT-Knoxville opted to cap its enrollment at 26,000 several years ago. (Of the $15 million increase in higher education operating funds approved by the state legislature this year, MTSU alone got nearly $5 million whereas Knoxville got less than $1 million.)

Double-digit tuition increases in each of the past three years have helped compensate for the dearth of state funding. They've gone in large part to fulfill a commitment to raise faculty salaries by an average 6 percent a year to enable UT from falling further behind progressive states like Georgia and perhaps gain ground on others. For the upcoming year, THEC has endorsed a 7.5 percent tuition increase, which doesn't bring in nearly enough to sustain the faculty salary raise commitment. And the cumulative tuition increases have created a dilemma of another sort. From running below the SREB average four years ago, UT tuition is now well above it, and Shumaker is disturbed by that.

"I've always thought that the fairest and most efficient form of financial aid is low tuition," he says. "That's the spirit of public universities, and no bureaucracy needs to support it. Look at how much we spend on administering federal grants and loans both on campuses and in Washington. Just keep tuition low, and you don't need a bureaucracy."

So what's a new UT president to do to raise enough revenue to start restoring an ailing university to better health? Shumaker has several courses of action in mind, along with cutting programs that don't meet standards of "mission centrality" and reallocating funds to higher priority uses. His list starts with revamping, if not abolishing, the THEC formula in order to gain additional public funds, while also revving up private fund raising.

The Formula

Shumaker rails against the present THEC formula's emphasis on enrollment. "Any formula that puts a premium on enrollment growth as the sole factor for budget increases is insidious and detrimental to the quality of higher education because all you want is bodies," he asserts. More sweepingly, he adds, "A formula is not the way to go...What's needed is a system of performance-based funding."

And how would performance be measured for funding purposes? "I think you measure a university against six or seven goals, maybe three or four of which are core goals for all universities and two or three are goals that are unique to each particular university...every university should be held accountable for retention in the freshman year, persistence in the interim years, and then graduation within six years. Then add on that other things like growth of endowment, then add specialized things to UT like research dollars and companies started. You can tailor goals and measures to the character of each campus."

Revisions to the formula are high on the agenda of THEC's executive director, Richard Rhoda. But he sounds skeptical about a move to performance-based funding. "It collapsed of its own weight in South Carolina, and Kentucky also had a failure," he contends.

Shumaker acknowledges that, "Quite frankly, the thing that brought it down [in Kentucky], as well-conceived as I thought it was, was the fact that everybody wants performance goals until they realize they can't meet them. And that's what happened in Kentucky, where two or three campuses weren't going to meet their goals and therefore decided the whole system was flawed...and went to their legislators and got the process subverted."

He holds out hope that such subversion can be avoided in Tennessee, especially given the fact that performance-based budgeting has recently become the rage in important legislative circles. "I like to think that maybe John Morgan, Steve Adams, [Riley Darnell] and I could sit down with some legislative leaders and the new governor to try to figure out a new financing mechanism for universities based upon accountability on our side and investment on the state's side, [one] that is reasonable but will help us maintain our competitive position." Morgan, Adams and Darnell are the state's comptroller, treasurer and secretary of state respectively, and as such they serve as ex officio members of THEC's board of directors.

Fund Raising

Fund raising is one area where UT compares more favorably to other states. From Andy Holt to Ed Boling to Joe Johnson, UT had a succession of presidents who lacked the academic credentials of Gilley and Shumaker, but they were good at raising money. As of two years ago, UT's endowment of $668 million ranked 23rd among public universities nationally.

On the heels of a much-publicized $433 million fund-raising campaign that concluded in 1998, UT has more quietly continued to raise on the order of $95 million a year since then, according to the university's vice president for development, Jack Williams. But hardly any of this money is immediately spendable, and it takes years for much of it to even make its way into endowments from which the income can be spent. That's because many contributions take the form of pledges over several years, and a lot more take the form of trusts from which UT won't get the income until the grantor dies. Bequests aren't even counted as contributions until a donor dies.

From all this rich harvest, endowment income this past year only amounted to $27 million, of which less than half came to Knoxville. So stepped-up fund raising is by no means a quick fix to all that ails the university.

Still, it's high on Shumaker's priority list. And he's eager to get started on a fund-raising campaign with goals to be determined by a feasibility study. "We've got to start the feasibility study sooner rather than later because it's going to take nine months to do that," he says. "Based on that, you set your target for your campaign." Then, unable to wait until "later," he adds, "Short-term, our goal will be to raise the endowment to at least a billion dollars. Then I hope over eight years to raise it well beyond that, and our feasibility study will tell us how tough that will be."

He acknowledges, though, that in some ways a little delay may not be all bad. "What's happened in the last six months has really set us back. Nobody, including donors, likes to bet on a sick racehorse. So we've got to get the vision, the message clear because that's the core of the case statement for the campaign."

As much success as Shumaker may have in raising revenues, it's clear that budgetary exigencies are going to force curtailment or elimination of some programs in the name of strengthening others. Indeed, Shumaker's success in redirection of resources at Louisville was one of the reasons he was sought out for his present post. More than $28 million got reallocated at Louisville, he claims, in large part through the elimination of low-performance graduate programs and an entire School of Allied Health.

The UT Space Institute in Tullahoma is likely to be an early casualty of his knife-wielding here. With a budget of nearly $10 million, the Space Institute has 42 faculty members and only 75 students. Moreover, with the exception of aeronautical engineering, most of its graduate programs are duplicative of offerings in Knoxville. "It's not clear to me that it is functioning at a level that is appropriate," Shumaker observes. "It doesn't mean there are bad people there necessarily. But it's one thing to have a core of great and productive faculty, but they are supposed to be teaching students and there really aren't any."

Shumaker also suspects there are duplicative course offerings on the Knoxville campus. "Every university probably has seven or eight different statistics departments that are nestled in other areas. So we'll look at those things. And what I would ask the chancellor to do, if we reestablish that position, is to work with me and the staff to rationalize all that." Yet rationalization is probably just the top of the iceberg. Eradication is almost sure to follow, and for every program that's eliminated there's almost bound to be a battle royal involving not only administrators, faculty, and students, but also alumni and other vested interests.

Shumaker says he's ready for these battles. "I'm not paid a large salary to avoid tough decisions, and so we'll do it," he asserts.
 

August 15, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 33
© 2002 Metro Pulse